The present invention relates to systems and methods for acquiring physiological data. More particularly, the invention relates to a non-contact method for acquiring the current physiological data of a subject.
Electrocardiography is a methodology of recording of the electrical activity of the heart in a form of an electrocardiogram (ECG), which is a time-varying signal representing such activity. Electrocardiography is known to be an effective and non-invasive diagnostic tool for cardiac monitoring. Several systems have been developed for continuous, remote ECG-monitoring using Body Sensor Networks (BSNs), which include a wireless, battery-operated, body-worn sensor that collecting ECG data and transmitting the data to a gateway device (such as a smart phone, for example). The gateway device reports these data over the internet to a remote base station, which is typically a hospital server or caregiver's computer. Such remote monitoring allows collecting the data during a person's regular daily activity and enables early detection of conditions such as tachycardia or angina. The availability of continuous long-term data can help identify gradual, long term trends in the cardiac health of at-risk patients.
While the physiological-signal-based approach eliminates the need for security key storage and complex exponentiation computation in sensors, the process of collection of physiological data with the use of a BSN on a human body is prone to security breaches and may jeopardize the privacy of the patient. A specific important concern is whether such security measures are vulnerable to attacks when the attacker is in close proximity to a BSN and senses physiological signals through non-contact processes such as, for example, electromagnetic coupling: when two individuals are in close proximity, the electrocardiographic signal of one person can couple with an electroencephalographic signal of the other.
The possibility of procuring physiological information about a person with non-contacting means begs a question of how obviate or patch such vulnerability, and defines a need in a secure system and method configured for acquisition of physiological data using a non-contact method and monitoring at least one subject with no sensors attached in a non-clinical setting where monitoring systems are conventionally not robust against security attacks.